The
standard Bible of
the middle ages was the Latin Vulgate
version attributed to St Jerome. However, at various times Bibles, or
paraphrases of Bible stories, appeared in the vernacular.
These had a chequered history, and it seems that each florescence of the
vernacular Bible was followed by a crackdown by the church authorities.
The short explanation as to why, is that the church was autocratic and
kept the sacred words under their own control as a means of combatting
heresy. A closer look at the whole relationship between language, literacy
and authority poses some interesting points to ponder.

When
Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the early
4th century, during the reign of Constantine, Latin was the vernacular
of the ruling classes, not only in Italy, but way beyond. The imposition
of authority over even the most nitpicking details of the beliefs of the
Christian church was related to the imposition of authority by the emperor
over his subjects. The divergences of belief among those who were to be
labelled heretics were often highly esoteric and not related to the basics
of living a good Christian life, nor to anything that could be clarified
by a simple reading of the Bible. However, a squabbling church represented
a squabbling empire, and that was not good. Conformity in belief represented
good government.

The
Emperor Constantine

This
is a small segment of a leaf from the Codex Palatinus (British Library,
add. ms. 40107, f.1), an Old Latin version of the gospels from the 4th or
5th century. By permission of the British Library.

There
were various Latin versions of the Bible around in the early centuries.
The long process by which St Jerome translated the Old
Testament afresh from Hebrew versions, and the New
Testament from Greek, was to render an accurate version of the text
in the vernacular. The name Vulgate, by which his translation is known,
simply refers to the fact that it is in the common tongue. However, over
the period of several centuries when this version of the Bible became
the standard text for the expansion of the Christian religion back into
the territories of the pagan barbarian rulers, the language was no longer
that of the people, but of an intellectual elite living in monastic seclusion.

The
Roman Empire did not end one Thursday, but while the early monks were
attempting to spread their message across an ethnically labile and disordered
Europe, central government and control were falling apart. By the early
6th century a barbarian, Theoderic, an Ostrogoth, had set himself up in
Italy as emperor; not that there was much to be emperor of.

Mausoleum
of Theoderic at Ravenna.

Segment
from the Codex Argenteus in Uppsala, a 4th century Gothic language Bible
text.

A better image of a page from this manuscript can be found here on the Codex Argenteus website produced by Uppsala University Libraty.

At
this time some religious texts, including Biblical texts, were translated
into the Gothic language and produced in lavish editions, with silver
or gold ink on purple dyed vellum,
a tradition for very posh manuscripts in the Byzantine culture. No doubt
this use of the vernacular for sacred texts was putting a Gothic stamp
on kingship and following an imperial tradition of tying together church
and state. Theoderic did not found a dynasty. The emperor Justinian reclaimed
some of the Western Empire, for a time, and Europe went reeling along
its chaotic track.

Very
few of these Gothic language codices
survive. They did not just fade away, but were actively destroyed by an
authoritarian church which was developing its own power base in the world
of temporal affairs. Relics have been discovered, scraped down and written
over as palimpsests,
among the books from libraries such as the monastery of Bobbio. The Goths
were followers of the Arian heresy, and their texts were destroyed along
with other heretical works from which the parchment
was reclaimed in the early monastic expansions.

What
the Arians believed was not in defiance of Christian practice, but of
philosophy and, dare one say, semantics. They held that, within the Holy
Trinity, the Son was inferior to the Father. The Father was eternal, but
the Son had an origin. The belief sprang from similar sources to those
of the Gnostics, Greek speakers steeped in the subtle terminologies of
philosophy. Complex concepts were possibly lost in translation. The dispute
was aired vigorously at the First Council of Nicea in 325, attended by
the Emperor Constantine himself.

The
Arian belief took hold among a number of the barbarian groups and the Catholic
hierarchy took some centuries to get rid of it entirely. When the Frankish
king Clovis was baptised with great fanfare, it is more than likely that
he was being rescued, not from paganism, but from Arian Christianity, although that is not what it says in the chronicles.

A
modern stature of the baptism of Clovis, outside the church of St Remi
in Rheims, where the event supposedly occurred.

By
the time of Charlemagne, the church in the barbarian kingdoms was restoring
orthodoxy to the essential text by ensuring that libraries contained St
Jerome's Vulgate text of the Bible. That ensured there could be no anomalies
of interpretation. Besides, Charlemagne rather modelled himself after
a Roman Emperor, so Latin rather than Frankish texts again helped to tie
together church and concepts of kingship. It is also possible that the
Frankish aristocracy actually spoke Latin as a second language, as their
own vernacular was not that of many of their subjects. The great Bibles
of the Carolingian era were all in Latin.

A 10th century miniature depicts Charlemagne giving counsel to his son Pepin,
king of Italy, while a scribe records proceedings (Modena Cathedral Archives,
Cod. ord. 1. 2., f.156).

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